But this week, Google announced it would pull the plug on Google Wave, just short of a year after the thing hit the market. Google says it will keep the Wave platform live until at least the end of the year, and use some of the technology from Wave on other products. In a statement, Urs Hölzle, a senior VP at Google, sought to play up the parts of the Google Wave experiment that succeeded.

"The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code," Hölzle wrote.

Last month, for instance, Google announced it would cease Nexus One sales in the US, but promised that customer support for existing Nexus One owners would remain in place. In addition, Google said Vodafone in the UK and KT in Korea would continue to sell Nexus One handsets – and hinted that other carriers might also get in on the act, depending on "local market conditions."